Spotting Fake Celebrity Endorsements Of Diet And Health Remedies

While Oprah Winfrey is sought after by companies to endorse their products, some companies have skipped the "get her permission" step. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Sure, sure, everything about Hollywood is 100% real, the National Enquirer is a scientific journal, all movies are pretty much documentaries, every face, breast and butt you see is completely authentic, celebrities always regularly use the products that they endorse, and now...add another to this list, celebrities are actually endorsing the products that they seem to be endorsing.

(For those wondering about the breast and butt statement, this list is using "sarcasm." "Sarcasm" is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as "the use of words that mean the opposite of what you really want to say.")

One of the latest trends is fake advertisements, web sites or social media posts claiming that celebrities are endorsing a product when the celebrities never really did. Herb Weisbaum reports for NBC News on bogus "news" sites that even use the logos of popular news outlets to get you to buy products or services. One example is a site that looks like a Today show site and claims that Joy Behar is quitting The View to work on an anti-aging skin cream. Seems a bit implausible that Behar would need to quit the television show to concentrate on such a venture, unless she was actually the one mixing the skin cream chemicals. Indeed, Behar and her co-hosts completely denied this attestment:

Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Mark Cuban and Neurocell pills: as reported in Forbes by Matt Herper, looks like the company "forgot" that they didn't really get the endorsements of these billionaires for their brain enhancer and memory aid.

The legal system and regulatory bodies have been trying to prevent such practices. For instance, back in 2013, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) shut down fake news websites aiming to market acai berry supplements and other weight-loss products. But keeping up with the such scams is difficult, especially with many regulatory bodies like the FTC having to keep track of too many things while dealing with budget cuts. (Maybe the FTC needs some celebrity endorsements to help its funding.)

Why do businesses persist in these shady practices? Well, apparently, they work. First of all, people seem to want to buy what many celebrities support even when there's little connection between the celebrities and the products. Look at Ozzy Osbourne endorsing "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter," because when you think of Ozzy Osbourne, you think of healthy and low fat.

Secondly, many people automatically click on anything related to a celebrity. Just observe how many retweets a celebrity tweet will get even when the tweet seems rather mundane. For example, look at how many retweets this tweet got: